Its 6.8-inch display is lit from the sides, like the rest of the Kindle lineup, rather than being backlit like a smartphone or laptop’s screen, which can cause more eye strain, and you can adjust the light levels to give the screen a warmer tone for nighttime reading. This is the gold standard for e-readers, and it’s the one I carry with me most often. That purchase replaces those ads with the cover of whatever book you’re reading, which is significantly nicer to look at (and who needs another ad vying for their attention when you’re trying to read?). No matter which Kindle you get, it’s probably worth spending an extra $20 to remove the special offers (read: ads) that show up on your lock screen. Over the last seven years, I’ve bought, gifted, or tested nearly every Kindle that’s come out - both in my personal life and in my career as a tech writer - and found what makes each one worth buying (or passing up). Now, there’s more than just one Kindle to choose from, and picking one isn’t as easy as figuring out which one holds the most books or has the longest battery life (they can all store thousands of books, and all last weeks on a single charge). Those two features alone have made the Kindle indispensable in my life, but it’s only gotten better with every iteration. Beyond that, it made remembering what I read easier, as I could highlight the text inside any ebook - no marking up paper necessary - and it would automatically get saved in a text file I could access from a computer later on. With it, I could carry hundreds of ebooks in my bag while hardly adding any weight, and I could access them all on the go without having to pick one on my way out the door.

I picked up my first Kindle in college, about ten years ago, and it was the first device that helped me actually finish books.

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